Im not sure what you mean about binutils but as long as you have fixed the problem, i guess its fine.

sudo apt-get install binutils... provides a bunch of useful binary utilities in Linux. This includes the strings command, which is often used in bash scripts. I'm not sure which of these missing utilities was causing the failure, but it would be interesting to know.

I'm running into problems compiling the bootloader on Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS). Ultimately for making a PB12 image for the black pill but I haven't gotten that far yet, I can't even get a working image for an existing board.

Recompiling the blue pill PC13 one results in an image that when flashed looks OK to the point where it does the fast-flash sequence on reset but never correctly enumerates on USB. (The board has of course had its resistor value modified already)

I was using the standard Xenial-supplied 4.9.3. Thanks, I was able to make a bluepill binary that worked using the 4.8 arduino crosscompiler toolchain. Hopefully the blackpill version will work as well.

I've added instructions on building the bootloaders using Linux Mint 17.3 and Arduino 1.6.12 with stm32duino to the bootloader wiki. The needed toolchain is already included in the standard stm32duino installation.